Best Potting Soil for Container Gardening

One of easiest and famous way among the home gardeners in planting their plants is by using container in their gardening activities.

There a lot of reasons why people choose container in planting their plants and one of them is because it can be used at a small size area.

We often heard people are saying that they do not have enough spaces as an excuse for them to not grow any plants at their home. With container gardening technique that kind of excuses is not applicable anymore.

This is because containers for gardening purposes come in various sizes and designs. They are also multi-layer gardening containers for people who would like to grow many plants in limited spaces.

Hanging containers, window containers and self-watering containers are some of the containers that are quite famous and useful for people who would like to grow plants with limited spaces.

However, please bear in minds that containers gardening is not only limited for people who have limited spaces for gardening purposes.

There are also gardening containers that are specially made for people who would like to do gardening at large outdoor spaces. This is due to a few benefits that come with it.

One the benefits of container gardening is that it is easy for you to take care of your plants.

The soil that you are going to use is usually well prepared and treated that it could provide your plants with enough nutrients and are also free from pathogens that can cause diseases.

Other maintenance works such as weeding, watering, mulching and pest controls could easily be done at the targeted area.

Another benefit of using container in your gardening effort is that it is quite flexible compare if you are growing your plants directly on the ground.

The container can easily be moved around if it happened you need to move it from its original place.

You would also be able to change the type of the plants easily if you planted them in a container just in case you do not like the existing planted plants.

One of the important factors in determining the success when growing plants in containers; is the type of soil that you are going to use as a planting medium.

This is because your plants will solely depend on the soils as their source for nutrients and water so that they could grow healthily.

Unlike planting plants on the ground that your plants’ roots could creep wildly underground to source for the nutrients and water, plants that are grown in the container only have limited roots area.

The size of the roots’ area is only the size of your pots with the soils. Therefore, high concern needs to be put in to ensure that you provide the soil that has the best condition for plants growth.

You can either make your own potting soil or you can buy the readymade potting soils that are readily to be used out of the packaging.

When buying a potting soil for container gardening purposes, there are a few tips on choosing the best potting soils.

The first one is to ensure that you buy the soil with the correct pH range. Normal pH range for most of the plants is between 5.5 and 7.5.

Too low from that range is considered to be too acidic and higher than that is considered to be too alkaline.

The reason why I say this is because; there are some potting soils that are made slightly more acidic and more alkaline than the normal pH range.

This is because there some plants those are preferred to be planted in this type of soil.

If you are making your own soil, you can add a little bit extra of agriculture lime to make the soil more alkaline and you can add some sulfur to make the soil more acidic.

The second tips in choosing your potting soil is to determine whether it is totally organic or not.

For people who are not going to do gardening organically, maybe this factor is not that important for them as they can use any soils they want.

However, for people who intended to do gardening organically, then this factor is very important because you do not want any chemicals that influence the growth of your plants.

Please read the potting soils packaging thoroughly as the manufacture will always mention whether their potting soils is either organic or not.

If there is nothing written on the packaging and you are not sure about it, the best thing is just to forget about the particular potting soil as there many more other choices for you.

The best is if you could find the one that are already certified by organic certification agency such as Organic Material Research Institute (OMRI).

The third aspect that you can look into when choosing a potting soil for containers gardening is the type and quantity of organic material that were being mixed into the potting soil.

The more is always the better. Some potting mix includes various type of organic matters such earthworms’ castings and bat guano in one bag of potting mix.

Another general technique that I found around the web when browsing for a good potting mix is the weight of the packaging.

If you found a potting soil packaging that are unusually heavy from the size of the normal packaging then you should avoid from buying it unless you are very sure that it is very good soil.

This is because it is suspected that it contains more invaluable and cheap wood chips that are not really useful for the plants growth.

To make works of choosing the best potting soil for container gardening easier for you, I have listed a few good potting soils that is worth the money you spent on as below:

1. FoxFarm Happy Frog Potting Soil, 2-Cubic Feet

In my opinion, this is one of the good potting soil that you could buy to be used for container gardening.

The main reason why i say this is because of the positive reviews and ratings that this potting soil received from its previous buyers.

The second reason is because this potting soil is rich with organic materials that have been mixed within the potting soil. Some of the organic material that are included in this potting soil are earthworms castings, bat guano and composted forest humus.